?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000
EL LISSITZKY (1890-1941) [BEAT THE WHITES WITH THE RED WEDGE.] 1919-20. 19x271/4 inches. Condition A-: minor repaired tears in margins; slight loss upper left corner. This constructivist icon par excellence is not only one of the rarest and most important posters ever designed but is also one of the most elusive. A work of ingenious political propaganda, the image which so basically (and yet so sophisticatedly) depicts the Red Bolshevik's victory over the White Russians was published by the Russian State agency Litizdat, (Peter White cites an initial print run of 2000 copies, p. 40). Not only was it a simple enough visualization of the political situation for even a semi-literate peasant to understand, but it was accomplished in an abstract style that in many ways presaged the Bauhaus and shaped the direction of Russian constructivism for years to come. "It was Lissitzky's poster which showed the greatest possibility of enriching the artistic language and which went down in the history of the poster as an example of the synthesis of functional aim and free and independent expression." (Bojko p. 34). When this poster was printed it was hung all around Russia, in the streets and on the trains. By some accounts only one (if any) copies of the original printing exist. Allegedly in 1926 Lissitzky himself reproduced the poster. The image was also widely reproduced behind the Iron Curtain in the 1960s. The copy for sale here was purchased in Paris in 1939 along with a collection of World War I posters from an antiquarian bookseller in the Passage Verdeau. A pre-war copy of this mythical poster has not appeared at auction since 1986. Bojko p. 34, Modern 25, Weill 231.
![EL LISSITZKY (1890-1941) [BEAT THE WHITES WITH THE RED WEDGE.] 1919-20. 19x27 inches.](https://catalogue.swanngalleries.com/full//804\556804.jpg)
